New Europe

Europe has never been a matter of boundaries alone. “European civilization has entered into the truth, into the plan of Providence”, as the historian-statesman François Guizot put it. “It advances according to the ways of God. That is the rational principle of its superiority.” Borders themselves – the Sava River, the Bosphorus, the Urals – were always negotiable. Because it stood for so much more than mere territory, Europe’s nineteenth-century Powers had no difficulty universalizing their values in its name. Backed by their temporary but highly impressive technological and military superiority, they were able to impose the emergent rules of their state system on the rest of the world as the epitome of civilized order.

Guizot’s paradigm blossomed into a story of global progress under European guardianship. In law and in war, the Victorians and their successors held fast to the idea of a single “standard of civilization” that marked Europe (and honorary members like the North Americans) out from barbarians and savages. Africa and Asia’s shortcomings they attributed to biology, or to the pernicious impact of ossified religious and political traditions. Either way, there was, as the twentieth century dawned, nothing innocent about the concept of civilization, and it was impossible to separate it from the Eurocentric character of the world and the international system that had evolved with it.

The First World War should have put a stop to this narcissism. But Europeans had grown used to their own importance. Domestically, their elites wanted the ancien régime back and tried to restore it, until the slump did it in for good. Abroad, the League of Nations transposed the old paternalistic language into a new key and took over areas such as the Middle East, which had previously escaped the civilizing mission’s dubious benefits. As the Versailles settlement came under attack from Left and Right on the Continent itself, not to mention from the “rising tide of colour” in the colonies, European liberals became ever more anxious. Yet the idea that theirs was the continent of progress and freedom was never completely abandoned.

H. A. L. Fisher’s bestselling History of Europe (1935) was either heroically self-assured or breathtakingly complacent, depending on one’s point of view: either way, it insisted – in the year of the League of Nation’s most dismal failure – that what united Europeans was their commitment to the values of liberalism. Hitler’s defeat came in the nick of time.

If this story is worth retelling, it is because it illuminates the genealogy and the pre-suppositions of so many of Fisher’s post-war academic successors. The standard account of Europe’s twentieth century is in turns anguished, relieved and elegiac. Shadowed by the departed Golden Age, it recounts the travails of an older and calmer civilization torn apart by the barbarians within, and able only to survive after 1945 at the cost of losing its global primacy (and thus its claim on the title of civilization itself). It is essentially a story of high politics – recounted in terms of the rise and fall of a system of states. (The approach itself originated after the First World War in the radical critique of secret diplomacy, and the publication and counter-publication of archives. Indeed, this vast outpouring of documents was the precondition for diplomatic history to emerge as a professional discipline.) As a frame for understanding it has proved to be incredibly tenacious, easily riding out numerous shifts in historical fashion. In the 1980s, mainstream scholarship was still fighting over who had started the First World War, although it had by then bolted on a similar kind of discussion about the causes of the Second World War too. Historians argued over nuance but agreed on the same basic plot: Sarajevo and its unfortunate consequences; Versailles and its unravelling; Weimar’s crisis, the rise of Hitler and the collapse of the Popular Front. Spain loomed out of isolation with the Civil War and then vanished again once Franco won. Apart from Munich, Eastern Europe got scarcely a look in. It was mostly gunshots and conferences, battlegrounds and the mopping up afterwards. A statistical analysis of nearly a dozen such works confirms this: overwhelmingly political (with little social history, less culture and almost no science), the average history devoted precisely 8.8 per cent of its pages to events outside Europe and presented the continent as a Big Boys’ club dominated by events in Germany, France, Britain and Russia (73.7 per cent). The Scandinavians got almost no attention, and the Balts were statistically insignificant. Less surprisingly, perhaps – the findings come from the mid-1970s – historians bustled through the years after 1945. Clearly they did not know what to do once Hitler was gone, leaving behind him an aftermath so much less tragic, noteworthy, or indeed European than all that interwar Sturm und Drang.

Barbarism and Civilization: A history of Europe in our time is a rich and broad-ranging synthesis that updates this tradition and – it should be said – vastly improves on it. Bernard Wasserstein tells us at the outset that his goal is “to fashion a narrative of the main contours of the political, diplomatic and military history of Europe”. If there are few surprises of interpretation, there is the security of knowing that a well-known story is being told well, and the book has a pleasing density and balance. In fact, although he follows the customary narrative for the most part, his version encompasses more of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Jews, and much more about social, economic and demographic trends than was once customary. All these factors are treated judiciously and with a nice eye for detail, and the panoramic surveys – of the Continent’s society, demography and culture at specific dates – balance the better-known stories of high policy. Numerous plums enrich an always fluently written and insightful text that artfully conceals the vast amount of material that has been synthesized.

Clearly, the days are gone when historians were happy to leave post-war Europe to the social scientists. The year 1945 no longer looks like “the end of the European era”, and historians are at last busy getting to grips with it. Three very substantial surveys of the post-war era have been published recently. Not surprisingly, therefore, fully half of Wasserstein’s work is devoted to this period, and to the contrasting evolutions of Communist and what he terms Liberal Europe. The author maps out a clear and entertaining tale of Cold War politics and diplomacy, interspersed with glances at changing social mores and sexual and artistic habits. It is with the eventual and bitter-sweet triumph of this Liberal Europe that Wasserstein closes, relieved but slightly nervous about the vacuum of values that he perceives across a continent that has given up religion and found nothing to take its place. It is a triumph for civilization, perhaps, but one which has amply revealed Europe’s capacity for barbarism and evil.

Throughout, in fact, we are in a world where civilization’s hold is fragile. This is clear from the fine opening survey of the Continent on the eve of war in 1914. In just over one hundred pages, Wasserstein gives an admirable outline of the course of the conflict, and its military and diplomatic aftermath. We know the dismal prospect ahead – the feeble recovery of a bourgeoisie which no sooner finds itself in the driving seat than it is squeezed out by a crowd of rougher types. Europeans, Wasserstein comments, began to feel like Romans of the Late Republic after they were “subjected to the rule of oppressive emperors”. Entering an “Age of Anxiety” they sensed the loss of liberty all the more keenly for having known so well what it tasted like. Freud, Keynes and Ortega y Gasset testify in these pages to their disillusionment, despairingly confronting the breakdown of reason and the triumph of uninhibited violence.

Do such men and their diagnoses perhaps also speak for the author? It seems evident that in some measure they do. When Wasserstein describes the laws of war, he refers to “civilized nations” in terms that an Edwardian diplomat might have been happy to use, and he commiserates with Keynes’s despairing sense of European culture on the verge, and Ortega’s gloom as interwar mass culture slides into philistinism. Dictators from both Left and Right – “little dictators” in Eastern Europe (an unfortunate phrase which plays down the impact of the shift to the Right there) and bigger ones elsewhere – challenge the liberal order in an eruption of primitivism against civilized values. In fact, when we come to liberalism’s political challengers, the book’s idea of what constitutes normality becomes unmistakable. Stalinism, Wasserstein tells us, made something called “normal life” almost impossible. Italian Fascism was a “primitive rationalization of gangsterism rather than a political philosophy in the conventional sense”. Nazism served disoriented Germans’ psychosocial needs – it is presented as a kind of political pathology, a “primitive doctrine”. The drumbeat of savagery sounds in the heartland of civilized values.

It is at this point that one wonders about the usefulness of what we might loosely call the liberal historical perspective. “Primitivism” is a concept which may help us understand the mind of a J. S. Mill or a James FitzJames Stephen, but if it can’t help us in Africa (those days are behind us) I am not convinced it can do much to help us understand democracy’s interwar competitors either. There were some crude blusterers among Italy’s Fascists, but plenty of educated men too – enough to make Winston Churchill, among many others, a sympathetic observer of the Duce’s regime. It was not the prospect of a good punch-up that attracted their attention, but the policies Fascists pursued and the promises they made, not to mention a shared anti-Communism and the promise of stable rule (after many parliaments had failed to provide this). Bourgeois rule in Europe did not collapse but reoriented itself to authoritarian and corporatist tendencies.

As for Hitler or Stalin, their domination is clear enough. But one can make too much of their character flaws, oddly comforting though they may seem. To take an example – although Stalin may well have been paranoid and Tito “too big for his breeches”, their clash of egos was scarcely the reason for the split of 1947. That stemmed from the threat the Yugoslavs posed to the Kremlin’s ongoing political experiment of trying to control Eastern Europe not (pace Wasserstein) through the Red Army, which was rapidly demobilized, but through what were effectively new national Communist Parties of doubtful reliability. Michael Oakeshott once warned about trying to pathologize the tyrant; it was, he observed, no way to explain powerful ideologies that often showed extraordinary staying power. The observation has lost none of its relevance at a time when the popular appetite for Hitler and Stalin remains as voracious as ever. Dictator denunciation – in many ways the obverse of hero worship – attempts to ring-fence civilization off from the totalitarian temptation – as indeed from other forms of political violence as well. Nationalism, at least in its more belligerent guise, apparently strikes our author as equally unfathomable. The reasons for ethnic conflict, we learn here, “lie buried in human hearts” – expressions of “deeply rooted and instinctive social feelings of our species”. The appeal to biology and psychology is as revealing as the earlier invocation of Fascism’s primitiveness. In both cases, the effect is to bracket the phenomenon off from modernity, to preserve civilization’s purity, and to offer not so much an explanation as a health warning: hic sunt leones.

Liberalism was on the way out in interwar Europe, but did it really make a comeback after that? After all, the old bourgeois order was vanishing as surely as the kings and emperors of yesteryear. Civil liberties were more secure for most people in the West after 1945 (though not for Italian, Greek, or Iberian leftists), but how important a factor was that in the Continent’s extraordinary social and political transformation? It was not pre-war liberalism but consensus politics and the triumph of social and Christian democracy that underpinned the new parliamentarism. Wasserstein devotes little space to these shifts and adaptations. Instead, he takes the high political road via Suez, decolonization and the American–Soviet rivalry. One might make a similar observation about his approach to Eastern Europe. If the deprivation of liberty was real, it was rather differently felt by aristocrats and by members of Milovan Djilas’s “new class”. Barbarism and Civilization gives us the story of Soviet imperial rule staggering from one crisis to another – Berlin, Hungary, Prague, Gdansk – and has much less to say about Communist-led social engineering, urbanization and national industrialization. The peasantry vanish unmourned. Wasserstein highlights Cold War diplomacy over this quieter domestic revolution; yet it would seem hard to separate one from the other.

In short, while the book presents an engaging combination of political narrative and occasional tours d’horizon, there are always trade-offs, and the main one here is the lack of a sustained sociological analysis of the changes that capitalism, wars and ideological competition between them wrought across the Continent. By the time we get to the present, we can see where things ended up, but it is not so easy to tell how they got there. The bourgeoisie have gone; a new middle class has emerged. It is all a bit mysterious. Nineteen forty-five still functions as a dividing line, and the underlying shifts of institutions and markets that others have argued ran through the 1940s are conspicuous by their absence. Did the twentieth century witness the rise and fall of the European territorial state? Was there an Americanization of European social, economic and cultural institutions? What were the lasting post-war legacies of the continental mobilization of the Nazi war economy? Such questions have prompted some of the finest recent research in the field. But the answers fall into the gap between Wasserstein’s political story and his static snapshots of the condition of Europe. In effect, he provides us with two histories, not one: there is the collapse of the European state system and its incorporation into the networks of the global Cold War; and there is the longue (or at least moyenne) durée of social and cultural changes, a history we have mostly to fill in for ourselves.

It is the deep and growing parochialism of contemporary Europe’s view of things that creates the biggest challenge for the historian. The civilization to which this book’s title alludes had – for better or worse – a global reach. But Europeans, it seems, now basically acknowledge the outside world only when it comes to them or causes problems. In the first half of the twentieth century – when their empires were at their height – they paid the Rest virtually no attention at all. Barbarism and Civilization makes relatively little mention of the colonial world (or even America and Japan) before 1941, apart from Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, a key event in the changing European balance of power. No reason, one might say, why a history of Europe should. Except that it is noticeable how this changes in Wasserstein’s account after 1945, with a comprehensive discussion of decolonization. He invokes the importance of empire, but has little to say about the overseas empires themselves until they are slipping away. Wasserstein, the scholar of modern Jewish history, of Shanghai and of the secret lives of the impostor Trebitsch Lincoln, knows all about the global Europe, but as he surveys its twentieth century, he is still operating within the old paradigm.

Viewed from inside the early twenty-first-century Fortress, the outside world easily looks like a source of manifold disruption – waves of seaborne immigrants from the pauperized neighbouring fringe, cheap Chinese manufactures, CIA snatch-squads, growing dependence on energy-rich barbarians. The continent has no shortage of Cassandras (especially across the water), grimly prophesying an imminent new sack of Troy. Wasserstein’s calmness of tone in his closing encapsulation is therefore particularly welcome. He is not the man to be panicked by population slowdown and 9/11 and the rise of immigrant (meaning Muslim) communities in the continent’s great cities. He notes the greater toleration of sexual and cultural difference and other improvements compared with the past. Europeans may “have gone down in the world”, as he puts it, but they have better health, better teeth and (at least until recently) they seemed to be able to control capitalism and to live in societies with increasingly equal income distribution.

Yet while Wasserstein manages to salvage something of present value for the idea of civilization, one wonders whether this story Europe has told itself for so long – even when told as well as it is here – is really adequate to the increasingly multipolar international environment we inhabit. In our new world, even a reunified Europe is no longer at the centre of things. And yet this hardly seems a good reason not to think seriously about its place in the global order. Europe does not stand for civilization any longer, it is true. But the fact is, nobody does. Until Europeans find new ways to think about their past, and to connect their own internal struggles with the impact these had on everyone else, they will find it hard to come to terms with the loss of their past glories. In the meantime, Barbarism and Civilization will provide a valuable reminder of what they have left behind.

Bernard Wasserstein
BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION
A history of Europe in our time
901pp. Oxford University Press. £25.
978 0 19 873074 3